Beyond the checkout button: what 25 million Gulf shoppers actually want
Why a card-first stack stalls in the Gulf, how flexible payments became essential to winning in MENA, and what a market-ready checkout looks like across Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
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In MENA, "we accept cards" is the fastest way to leave revenue on the table
Merchants entering the Gulf budget for product, marketing, and logistics – and assume their existing card stack is enough on its own. It rarely is. The Gulf is one of the most banked, digitally advanced regions on earth – cards are well established – but with roughly 60% of the population under 30, consumer expectations are shifting fast toward payments that add value at checkout. For a generation of high-disposable-income shoppers, flexible, interest-free options aren't a convenience layer – they're increasingly the way they choose to buy. The result is a checkout that punishes the wrong defaults. A stack that doesn't offer the methods local shoppers expect – Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), plus rails like mada and Jaywan – converts a fraction of the traffic you paid to acquire. And bolting on each market one integration at a time turns "expand into MENA" into a multi-quarter engineering program before a single localized transaction clears.
The infrastructure decisions you make before launch quietly set what the region actually costs you.
In 20 minutes, you will walk away with:
The infrastructure you choose before launch decides what MENA actually costs you
The Local-Method Gap, Quantified
A framework to find where a card-first checkout silently loses Gulf shoppers – and what closing it is worth.
One Integration, Region-Ready
Why consolidating Tabby and local rails behind a single layer beats stitching providers together market by market.
Audit Before You Launch
A pre-expansion payments checklist that catches the MENA-specific gaps most go-to-market plans miss until conversion data exposes them.
Built for senior payments, growth, and commerce leaders
Built for Heads of Payments, VPs of Product and Growth, CFOs, and commercial leaders at companies entering or scaling across the Middle East. If you're preparing a market entry in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or the wider Gulf – anywhere local rails and consumer payment behavior differ sharply from your home market – this session is for you.
Sumit Tyagi leads Yuno's business across the Middle East and North Africa, based in Dubai. He brings over 15 years in regional payments, with senior roles at Amazon Payments, Western Union, and Visa. At Visa he ran Cybersource sales for MENA and owned the prepaid P&L across 43 countries.
Sally Batha is senior business development manager at Tabby, one of the company's first hires. A University of Leeds graduate in International Business and Finance, she's helped thousands of businesses grow with Tabby, and runs two businesses of her own in retail and FMCG.
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